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First HDD MPEG4 Video Camcorder
An anonymous reader submits "This is a few weeks old but we have to talk about
this. Samsung introduced the world first hard disk drive based camcorder so you don't have to buy those MiniDV, Hi8s, and DVD-Rs. You take pictures, play MP3s, PAL+NTSC video! The picture quality is 350K so not a replacement for digital camera. The downside is the HDD size is 1.5 Gig so you can record video just over an hour! Why can't these bozos let us put a 40gig 2.5 IDE drive and let us record continuously for 25+ hours! Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?"
I'm sure someone will figure a way to replace the internal drive with a larger one, as they did the first TiVo's.
It might be nice to have 25+ hours of recording capability, but try finding a battery that will let you do that. You're gonna have to swap batteries or plug in for extended use (or carry around one huge battery for that).
I'd also be concerned about file size limitations... if grandma and grandpa get one of these and try to transfer the file to a machine running win me or something, you don't want them to deal with the 2 GB file size limitations, etc...
Otherwise, yes, 25 hours of recording time may be useful... but is worth recording with a camcorder for 25 hours?
Is the IBM MicroDrive still around?
yes they are.
they have 2 problems....
1 - horribly expensive.. I can buy a CF card of the same size for less than 1/2 the price of a microdrive.
2 - horribly delicate.. pick up the microdrive and lightly pinch it... Oops.. it's dead now.
we used to use microdrives here for some data recording... we went through 10 of them in 3 months.. while the CF cards dont fail.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
25 hours of boring holiday footage.
This is the first? hmm... it reminds me a lot of the Hitachi MP-EG1 that I used a bit in the late 90's. It recorded full MPEG-1 video to its hard drive. (Although you only got about 20 mins as the hard drive was 260mb!)
As a general rule atleast, you won't find mpeg compression on tape; although it could be done. As a general paradigm with tape every frame has all the information to generate the entire image. But mpeg compresses across frames (I know I'm simplifying the process). So if you take one of these tapes and stick it in a player and push play you'ld find it rewinding all over the place trying to grab enough information to play from where you left off. Yes I am aware that DV also uses compression but not across frames. Every image is compressed discreetly. And I'm also aware that dvds compress across frames. But again that is a different scenario.
Also remember 8mm tapes aren't designed to store digital video the same way DV is. You really should not be using them for archive purpose and expect them to be in a reasonable state when you check in on them in a few years time. Ofcourse they work but there is a reason you get a price break buying them instead of a dv cam.
Samsung is not a hacker-friendly corporation like TiVo. If anything you'd get slapped with DMCA suit if you "upgrade" the drive.
Also, I don't think this is a consumer-grade HDD. There is no mention of the type in the official press release, and arising out of the fact that none of the current HDD mfg's make anything near 1.5gb capacity drives, I'm willing to guess: this is a proprietary model.